Hugues Le Roux

Hugues Le Roux
File:Hugues Le Roux 1910.jpg Hugues Le Roux in 1910
Member of the Senate
In office 11 January 1920 – 14 November 1925
Constituency	Seine-et-Oise
Personal details
Born	Robert Charles Henri Le Roux (1860-11-23)23 November 1860 Le Havre, France
Died	Paris, France
Political party	Democratic Republican Alliance
Spouse(s)	Bessie Van Vorst (m. 1914; d. 1928)
Awards	Legion of Honour
Signature	Hugues Le Roux's signature

Robert Charles Henri Le Roux (23 November 1860 – 14 November 1925), known by the pen name of Hugues Le Roux, was a French writer, politician, civil servant and journalist who wrote primarily about the French colonies and travel.

Biography

He was born at Le Havre, the son of Charles Clovis Le Roux and Henriette Gourgaud (granddaughter of Dugazon). He worked as a journalist for the La Revue politique et littéraire and later for Le Temps, Le Figaro, Le Journal and Le Matin. He published novels and collections of short stories.

A member of the Superior Council of the Colonies, he was entrusted with official missions to Abyssinia and the Ivory Coast.

In the early 1900's Le Roux gave a series of lectures in the United States and Canada on the subject of the French novel. Le Roux lectured at the University of Chicago, where he declared to an audience of students to have been Alphonse Daudet's private secretary at the start of his career, and that he was the real author of one of the best-known short stories printed over the name of Daudet, "The Beauty from Nivernais". He also asserted that Alfred Dreyfus had confessed his guilt and that Émile Zola believed him guilty. American journalist Theodore Stanton, a correspondent in Paris, mentioned this claim to Léon Daudet, — just before the ceremony of the unveiling of Saint-Marceaux's famous statue of his father in the Jardins des Champs-Élysées — and recorded his reply:

In the first place, M. Hugues Le Roux was never my father’s secretary. For thirty years his only secretary was M. Jules Ebner, who died last year. It is quite true that my father, in order to oblige M. Hugues Le Roux, dictated to him a copy of "La Belle Nivernaise," of which the plan, the characters, and the scenes had long been in Alphonse Daudet's head. It is possible that M. Hugues Le Roux may have modified some phrases in the manuscript dictated to him by my father, but that was the limit of what cannot in any way be called a collaboration. This claim once brought down upon M. Hugues Le Roux a stern rebuke from my father. The former then admitted that there was no truth in the assertion, and, in the presence of witnesses, offered as an excuse an intemperance of language. I trust, in the interest of M. Hugues Le Roux himself, that his language has again been misreported.

In 1908, The New York Times published a letter by Yves Guyot refuting other claims made at the time by Le Roux. In 1914 he married American writer Bessie Van Vorst.

General Councillor for the canton of Poissy, he was elected Senator on 11 January 1920 and his term of office ended on 14 November 1925 (the date of his death).

Hugues Le Roux died at his home at 58 Vaugirard street, in Paris.

Work

• L'Attentat Sloughine (1885; 1900)
• Médéric et Lisée (1887; illustrated edition (first published following L'Attentat Sloughine in 1885, followed by Aldric Mesle)
• Le Frère lai (1888)
• Chez les filles (1888)
• L'Enfer parisien (1888)
• Notre patron Alphonse Daudet (1888)
• Les jeux du cirque et la vie foraine (1889; illustrations by Jules-Arsène Garnier)
• Le Chemin du crime (1889)
• Les Larrons (1890)
• Les Fleurs à Paris (1890)
• Au Sahara (1891)
• Portraits de cire (1891)
• Tout pour l'honneur (1892)
• Marins et soldats (1892)
• Les mondains (1893)
• Gladys, Calmann-Lévy (1894)
• Je deviens colon. mœurs algériennes (1895)
• Notes sur la Norvège (1895)
• Le Festéjadou, récits du sud (1895)
• Ô mon passé... Mémoires d’un enfant (1896)
• Le Maître de l’heure (1897)
• Les Amants byzantins (1897)
• Nos filles. Qu’en ferons-nous ? (1898)
• Nos fils. Que feront-ils ? (1899)
• Le Fils à papa (1899; published as a serial novel in Le Figaro from 2 August 1899 to 13 September 1899)
• Gens de poudre (1899)
• Le Bilan du divorce (1900)
• Ménélik et nous (1902; illustrated with photographs)
• Voyage au Ouallaga. Itinéraire d’Addis-Ababa au Nil bleu (1901; with an out-of-text map)
• Prisonniers marocains, l’épopée d’Afrique (1903)
• Chasses et gens d’Abyssinie (1903)
• Le Wyoming (1904)
• Le Pays de la peur (1906; uncollected novella published in Je sais tout, No. 13, 15 February 1906)
• Ô mon passé (1910; illustrated by J. Jamet)
• Au champ d’honneur (1916)
• L'Heure du Japon (1918)
• Niger et Tchad. Mission Hugues Le Roux (1918)
• Te souviens-tu ? (1920)

Theatre

• L'Instantané (October 1901; vaudeville; with Gaston Arman de Caillavet, Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens)

References

• Brisson, Adolphe (1904). Portraits intimes, Vol. 2. Paris: Armand Colin.
• Dreyfus, Pierre (1937). Dreyfus: His Life and Letters. London: Hutchinson & Co.
• Guillaume, Isabelle (2021). "‘‘Le roman est de l’histoire, qui aurait pu être’’: l’insurrection algérienne de 1871 dans Marie Chassaing d’Adolphe Badin, Amour et gloire de Charles Baude de Maurceley et Le Maître de l’heure de Hugues Le Roux," Études françaises, Vol. LVII, No. 1, pp. 51–68.
• Gregório, Amélie (2021). "L’Autre France: représentations théâtrales et imaginaire colonial au tournant du xxe siècle," Études françaises, Vol. LVII, No. 1, pp. 69–84.
• Paulucci di Calboli, Raniero (1898). Journal de l'année 1898: au coeur de l'affaire Dreyfus. Paris: Stock.
• Rose, Kenneth D. (2014). Unspeakable Awfulness: America through the Eyes of European Travelers, 1865-1900. New York: Routledge.

External links

• Works by Hugues Le Roux at Gallica
• Works by Hugues le Roux at Project Gutenberg